I'm getting a bit tired with THIS argument as well.
"Oh, you can just go play your original copy."
Yeah, thanks, I've been doing that for, what, fifteen years now?
I didn't WANT an "homage". I don't think anyone did. We wanted a remake. Something that stays true to what the original was, while updating the parts of it that did not age well, or which were broken, unbalanced, or not fun (and yes, FFVII did have some issues there).
If Square wanted to go make a new game, they could do that. And, guess what? We'd STILL all be mocking it for the design decisions that have emerged thus far.
It is a remake. Comparisons to the original are fair game. When it fails to live up to snuff in areas that a game nearly twenty years old captured excellently, we are going to call it on that. And we are right to do so.
For that matter, we are right to call out those flaws even if it was a new game, and not a remake at all. Remember when FFXIII came out, and we gave it tons of flack for being all flash and no substance? Yeah, we're not only mocking this game because it's different, we're mocking it because we don't like what we see.
We don't want it to just be "the same". We want it to bring things back to when Square made good games. We want turn based combat, because we ENJOY turn based combat, and there are so few good examples of that play style these days. We want the original story, because Square has proven that they can't write a good story anymore if their lives depended on it. We want a game with minigames, with backtracking, with sidequests, with optional characters. With all the things that used to make games great, that FFVII did well, and that it appears the remake is going to smurf up entirely.
Change is not, in itself, a good thing. Some changes are good. Others are smurfing terrible. So far, we've seen one good change: The graphics. And everything else appears to be worse (in my opinion, some people actually like the gameplay). Yes, I'm going to criticize it for this. And if you're tired of it, then you can go back to arguing about the old game, and ignore the discussion of the new one.